Wow. Wrote a screenplay last month and suddenly I find myself (with amazing teammates, thank goodness) producing and starring in a short film from it! We’re shooting next month.

Lesson: incredible things happen when you learn what to say “yes” and “no” to

Background info: with the support of my good friends Kerron Schullere, Sagine Semajuste, Jazz Testolini, and others, I wrote a screenplay in September and cast a bunch of my homies in it (including those three), with the intention of shooting the project next year when I come back from Dubai. Then some awesome things happened and even more amazing people appeared and a whole huge shower of encouragement and motivation and optimism fell out of the sky, and before I knew it we were on track to submit for a first-time filmmakers’ mentorship program this week, receive our yea/nay verdict next week, finish shooting by November 21st, and possibly/probably have our premiere in April 2014 at the ReelWorld Film Festival.

Awesome, right?!

Answers to tough questions were found, pathways were dug around and under and through obstacles, and this film was so close to becoming a reality that I was astonished. My reason for that Facebook post was the realization that saying “yes” to one possibility had bred even more possibilities, and aside from saying “no” to fear and doubt I was also saying “no” to other good things that I could be doing with the time and energy and resources already being invested into the film. After all, if I spend an hour itemizing the props needed for the shoot, that’s an hour that was not spent doing some other activity. That isn’t a noble sacrifice or a painful tradeoff; it’s the logical result of there only being 24 hours in a day.

Well, it’s a good thing I got used to this aspect of saying “no,” because just yesterday my main partner in crime Kerron and I decided to postpone the project. It isn’t dead, and really it isn’t even taking a nap — trust me, there’s still a whoooole lot of prep work to do! We decided, however, to say “no” to the upcoming deadline and how cool it would feel to say that it took only ten weeks to write, cast, rehearse, prep and shoot the whole thing. And in so doing, we’re saying “yes” to an even awesomer final product. (Yes, “awesomer” is a thing now. Trust me. You can start saying it too.)

So stay tuned! And feel free to share your own stories of saying no to something you wanted, and whether or not you ended up with something even better!!